The first old-growth forest conference to be held in Southwest Colorado brought to Fort Lewis College this week foresters, climate researchers, tree-ring and ancenstral Puebloan experts, silviculturists and just plain folks who like to measure trees and climb trees for fun.
A common interest – the preservation of old-growth forests that are threatened today by wildfires, droughts and insect infestations – unify them.
Old-growth stands probably hold answers to questions that those interested in their fate can’t yet envisage, Laurie Swisher, a San Juan National Forest old-growth inventory specialist, said.
Swisher recalled that at an international old-growth conference in Ontario, Canada, in 2001, no presenter talked about climate change.
Now, it’s a common topic and researchers are turning, for example, to dendrochronology – tree-ring evidence – for answers to climate change, Swisher said.
“Old growth probably has answers that we don’t have questions for yet,” she said.
An estimated 100 people pre-registered for the conference.
More than a dozen presenters provided insight into their fields of expertise at the conference, held Monday and Tuesday in the FLC Community Concert Hall.
Old-growth forests in temperate, boreal and tropical settings are ecosystems unto themselves. The arboreal diversity is a genetic reservoir for researchers. The trees sequester carbon, stabilize soil against erosion and provide habitat for wildlife.
Marcie Demmy Bidwell, director of the Mountain Studies Institute, described climate trends noted in Southwest Colorado in the past decade and a half.
“We started to warm later than other places,” Bidwell said. “But the increase has been sharper.”
Bidwell spoke about sudden aspen decline, early snowmelt, the effects of blown-in dust on high-elevation snow and warming temperatures.
MSI has worked with partners to determine a range for future precipitation and temperature in Soutwest Colorado, Bidwell said. Using 72 model scenarios, temperatures could increase 2½ to 5 degrees by 2035 and as much as 8 degrees the end of the century, Bidwell said.
Precipitation is harder to project because monsoons aren’t consistent, Bidwell said. Future conditions could vary greatly, she said, but researchers anticipate that the snowpack below 8,200 feet would decrease and that snow would continue to melt earlier.
But peering into the future elicits a caveat, she said.
“We talk about projections, not predictions,” Bidwell said.
Swisher described the effect of wildfire, in particular the 2002 Missionary Ridge Fire, on ponderosa pine. Not all effects of the fire are understood yet, she said.
Strangely, Swisher said, in stands she had inventoried earlier, 47 percent of the ponderosa burned at low intensity. But in selected unsurveyed areas adjacent to high-intensity burning, all ponderosa burned at low intensity, she said.
“We want to go back and study the areas for variables that could affect the intensity of burning,” Swisher said. “If we get answers, we could spend our limited funding on areas that are most vulnerable.”
Bob Leverett, an engineer by training, co-founder of the Native Tree Society and an inveterate tree measurer, was a sort of master of ceremonies.
Leverett, who came to Durango in 2012 to pin down the exact height of a record-tall ponderosa pine in the Hermosa Creek watershed, said that “his” ponderosa at 160.6 feet is no longer the state’s tallest ponderosa.
The new champion, also a Hermosa Creek product, was measured at 162.3 feet by Matt Markworth, who works in the financial world in Ohio. But like Leverett, he’s never met a tall tree that he didn’t want to measure.
“I like to hike, but with a purpose,” Markworth said.
daler@durangoherald.com
